My baby sister Alexandra hung herself on the back step of my childhood home 2 years and 4 months ago. She was 29. She is greatly missed. She was pregnant at the time. She went through so much physical and mental pain in her life, she was in a abusive, violent relationship at the time of her death.

I feel like the first year afterwards i was in a daze and i am only starting to come to terms with what happened. I understand and i accept why you did what you did; that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt. You did not want to be in, or bring someone else into, such an intensely miserable existence filled with hard drugs and a emotionally and physically abusive partner who refused to leave.

I have a swirling sea of emotions:
Grief: i miss my sister.
Guilt: i was very hard on her in the last few years of her life, pushing her to get a job and move out of the parents house and become more self-sufficient. i know my actions were (for the most part) taken for the greater good and with her best interests at heart; that does not mean that the words in your suicide note do not hurt. I could have done so much more; visited you, not judged you, not have my eyes glaze over when you spoke to me.
Anger: her partner of the time encouraged her to commit suicide like it was some type of notch on his belt, pawned her possessions as the family grieved the morning after her death.

What i find hardest to deal with is the methodical way you went about taking your life, you had a day by day countdown in your phone, you would casually remark that you would never have a 30th birthday. You have to be in an obscenely dark place to behave in this manner.  Occasionally i have my own thoughts of self-harm when life gets stressful; this is not something that i would ever do as i have seen the carnage that this type of act inflicts on a family.

I have dulled my emotions by abusing marijuana on weekends and on holidays, however there is only so much of this i can do. i think i am ready to stop doing this and attempt to ‘involve’ myself more in life and stop sabotaging my own relationships. sorry if this is a jumble of words. I hope this helps someone.

Martin V.